My Brother Gord's 'guest' appearance blog on SALES

For those of you who 'don't know' my brother Gord - he has also spent his entire life in radio - 35 years in Vancouer alone - and also did a stint with the Vancouver Canucks - He shares his wisdom and experience with this blog in the world of 'Sales in Radio'.

Gord is reachable at gcforbes@shaw.ca -

***Please give it a read and an RT if possible!***

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The other day I was reading through a series of Linkedin group discussions about the “single most important attribute a sales person can have”.

Meandering through the replies, I came across a great number of thoughts and rationales to support them…many of which were good, in and of themselves, but I would say the most often quoted was “being a good listener”.

Obviously it’s important to understand your customer’s needs through great listening skills…and if we got paid to be excellent listeners we would all be driving big cars and living in fancy houses.

In reality, the journey from your prospects office through to the execution of a successful campaign is fraught with challenges that only the most creative, versatile, well rounded and determined sales people can make on a consistent basis.

The business has changed dramatically since I first started producing spots back in 1973 at the Mighty 630 CHED…but never so significantly than since I left it in 2005 to work in the crazy world of Sports Marketing as VP Business Development for the Vancouver Canucks.

I see in the Linked in group “The Sales Floor” a few people that I worked with back in the “good ol’ days” when we basically showed up for work, took a few orders over the phone, had a nice bottle of wine with lunch and schmoozed clients with free tickets to Eskimo Games or dinner at The Point After with Bob McCord or Chuck Chandler (who were legitimate “Rock Stars” in the community).

Those old timers (Hi Len Thuesen) that have been able to stick with it for so many years should be like an encyclopaedia* for the younger members of this group because for these veterans to still be making a living in an environment that has evolved into what it is today takes a considerable amount of malleability and is truly remarkable.

Without getting into all of the industry and corporate challenges that have made your job so much more challenging, it still really comes down to one (complex) question for radio sales people.

How can I negotiate through the myriad obstacles within my station and actually deliver what the customer needs for him/her to justify this expense?

Yes, it’s important to listen carefully to what your prospect is saying…you will need some of that information to craft the execution of his/her campaign…but the most important piece of information you need to get is their definition of what constitutes success in their eyes.

Knowing where they need to get is the only way that you can possibly build the road to get there. To quote the inimitable Yogi Berra "You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."

Other than agency buyers, I never dealt with a client who said his idea of success was reaching 60% of adults 25-34, 3.5 times a week”. Clients have real needs like, I have to sell 50 of these things before next Tuesday when my loan payment is due.

Part of the problem I see these days with radio sales people is that many of them still believe that a catchy 30 second spot with a discounted, drive-heavy schedule on their top rated 25-54 station is something that clients are salivating for.

In the meantime, your lunch is getting eaten by some geeks at the Mountainview head office of Google who are equipping their sales people with data that allows your prospect to target their message directly to the guy in your neighborhood who has two kids, changes his own oil, travels once a quarter to Vegas and is hunting for the best deal on a 2011 Prius Hybrid in black.

How do you compete with that?

Folks, the days of selling spots based on cume and average quarter hours are long gone. Radio tuning in North America is down a measly 4%. Revenue is down 25%...and if you haven’t seen the revenue growth curve for Facebook, Google, Twitter etc., it is a shocking example that shows where your money is going.

So the question becomes…Is Radio still a viable ad medium in the face of this new reality…or should I go get a job selling Google search.

The answer to the question is yes…radio is still relevant and I believe that you will be able to continue to make a pretty good living at selling it…but not the way you have been.

When Sony introduced the Walkman back in 1978, pundits predicted that it would obsolete traditional radio, as we knew it. Since then, many iterations of portable music devices have come and gone, finally ceding dominance to the current Apple iPod which has become the category standard.

The idea that everyman was a better programmer for their own musical tastes than a Program Director, (even with hundreds of thousands of dollars cast against music testing and research) was appealing to the early adopters. Today, online stations abound.

Streaming has become easy and ubiquitous, yet the local radio station still exists, despite corporate cutbacks that have left them understaffed, overworked and under resourced.

Why is that?

I would propose that the combination of maintaining a local focus, with likeable personalities, relevant news and information and the ability to have an intimate relationship with listeners is the key reason that people still tune in from day to day.

Here in Vancouver, waking up every morning to Larry and Willy, getting the traffic and weather information I need to plan my day, hearing how the Canucks, Lions or Whitecaps did the day before and what concert is coming to town next week is just part of what people need from the medium…. but to save time preaching to the choir let’s all just agree that radio is still a great medium and get back to how we use its key strengths to sell advertising solutions to Joe’s café.

Our listeners are our friends. We keep them company, play them music, give them information, talk to them, ask them questions, send them on trips or to concerts or games…even let them talk on the radio. We send them Tweets. They “Like” us on Facebook. We reward them for their loyalty and listenership in many creative ways.

So suffice to say that we have nurtured this great relationship with our listeners in an effort to keep them listening more often and for longer periods of time… but what do we actually know about them?

There is this terrible measurement platform called PPM, which is at best a wild guess of extrapolated data as to who is listening, when and for how long. We get a few hundred people on the panel and hope to hell that a few of them tune in when we give away the Foo Fighters tickets and dinner at the Keg during our peak AQH.

Oh yeah, BBM can give us another guess as to the demographic makeup of our audience and then we take that information to our ad agencies and join our competitors in chasing the rates into the ground. (I know, I know…Agencies account for a large portion of our overall revenue so we have to play their game, but that’s a different problem that I’ll save for another post.)

If you have a loyal listen club, you should at the very least know their names and email addresses…but what if we knew how many times they came to our web site and what pages they visited. What if we knew where they lived and could plot them on a map to see where they were concentrated so that we could work with advertisers in areas where we had high penetration?

What if we knew how many contests they entered on our site without winning?

What if we knew what products they are in the market for? Do they have any pets? What if we could help them get a better deal on a new car? What if we could personally invite them to a product launch or restaurant opening? How much would it be worth to your advertisers to know this kind of stuff about your listeners?

While your competitors are in the local car dealers office extolling the benefits of being the number one station with Adults 25-54 in the Edmonton CMA, You are next door putting together a deal with his competitor to send a personal incentive to the 25 listeners within 5 miles of his dealership who have told you they are looking to buy a new car in the next 6 months.

Dear listener. You told us that you might be in the market for a new car so we went to Joe’s Ford down the street and asked him if he could do something special for loyal CXXX listeners like you. He told us that if you purchased a new car from him in the next 10 days, he would give you an additional $1000 off the price…just because we’re all friends.

Do you think it might be easier to sell a campaign with this kind of information as opposed to your cume figures? Of course it would. It’s what Facebook, Google and Yahoo are already doing that is taking billions of dollars out of the pockets of traditional media ‘peddlers’ around the globe.

In essence, we can do a lot of what Google et al do, but better. Better because of the relationships we have with our listeners and the fact that they will share stuff with us that they wouldn’t share with the big search engine guys.

They will share it with us because we understand them and communicate with them on an intimate level and because we live in the same city, know the same people and go the same places. We wake them up in the morning, get them to work, share their opinions and play their favourite songs over, and over, and over….

So how does a sales person thrive in this new world reality? Listening well – yes, but also by learning about the tools that are available to be able to take to their advertisers a focused activation that is hyper-targeted to a small group of really interested people.

It includes spots. It includes a creative solution to their expressed needs and it includes pre-determined metrics on what success looks like. Most of all it includes knowing your listeners and working with a team of people at your station who are all focused on creating and executing a more holistic and ambitious solution to your clients needs.

The problem with all of this is that it’s more work and it’s more time consuming. Yup, it is…but the upside is huge once you get the reputation for proving customers successful executions. Plus you can stop wasting time casting a wide net by cold calling uninterested and unqualified prospects so that you can fill up your ‘call sheet’ and focus on bigger sustainable campaigns with more sophisticate marketers.

Some of the biggest challenges you will face in your efforts to save the industry will be from inside your own building.

Will your GM or group President invest in the tools to help you make more sales?

Will the PD buy into the concept of marketing to your listener database?

Will your GSM accept creatively packaged executions? Is your creative department staffed with “creatives” or are they just “writers”…but most importantly, are YOU determined to make a difference in the way you help your sponsors meet their expectations within the parameters that are set by your management group?

To be frank…my experience tells me that, with a couple of rare exceptions, (like Astral who are making the investment in tools), the key decision makers across the country haven’t yet made the link.

Most stations still look at their interactive properties as “something the promo guys can update”, and not as a serious potential money-maker. Stations have become so ingrained in “cutting back” that the idea of making an investment in the resources to forge new directions is out of the question.

The industry hasn’t yet attracted the kind of visionary technicians, who can drive these initiatives, nor will it until such time as the pain of losing money to ‘search’ becomes greater than the prospect of investing in the tools and training to reverse the flow of money out of the industry.

I would be happy to chat with anyone that would like more information on the tools and techniques required for relationship marketing.

Glossary for the younger readers.

*(an encyclopaedia is a book** that has information about every thing one would ever want to know).

**(A book is a bunch of paper with words on it that is bound into a document)